The first story, "Patriots," in Patrick Dacey's debut short story collection, We've Already Gone This Far, sets the tone for the rest of the book. What would be any other American suburb is turned into a cauldron of resentment, fear, loneliness and, finally, redemption. When a woman--still reeling from her husband's abandonment--takes her anger out on her neighbor's Iraq War veteran son, it's clear that Dacey analyzes human nature closely and mines relationships for insight.

In subsequent stories, a bored ex-football coach goes on a joyride with an old player who's come into hard times, and Dacey takes his readers into the depths of sadness and loneliness in both, showing how each man's expectations for the night become stand-ins for the expectations they had for themselves. A man living in a hotel after his wife leaves him has a revelation about love, friendship and responsibility in an Applebee's bar. Another man drives around the country looking for job opportunities that he can write home to his daughter about.

The story "Ballad," about an ex-musician trying to write a song with his baby daughter for his wife, unfolds as a literal representation of the collection's many layers. The narrative, written without punctuation as a stream-of-conscious monologue to the infant, becomes a story about the musician's failings as a husband, which becomes the perfect song.

For Dacey's characters, every moment of every day carries the potential for either dizzying heights or crushing defeat. --Josh Potter

Man on Fire, Stephen Kelman's follow-up to his Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Pigeon English, is a peculiar novel, the story of an Englishman named John Lock who, after receiving a cancer diagnosis, leaves his job and his wife to seek out a minor celebrity in India named Bibhuti Nayak. Bibhuti, who dictates some chapters from his own zen perspective, has made a name for himself by setting unusual records such as "43 kicks to the unprotected groin in one minute and a half" and "31 water melons dropped on stomach in one minute from height of 10m." He has achieved a guru-esque status thanks to these bizarre feats and his teachings advocating self-improvement. Lock arrives in India with an offer to help Bibhuti complete his next record attempt and ends up facing a crisis of conscience when Bibhuti's attempt reveals itself to be potentially life threatening.

Perhaps even odder than the premise is Kelman's approach to the story. The character of Bibhuti, an addendum reveals, is based on a real person, and many of the feats described in the book are based on actual records he set. This might explain why Kelman does not take an overtly humorous approach to the material, treating Bibhuti's painful search for transcendence with respect and compassion instead of ridicule. What on paper looks like a humorous book with a silly premise is better described as a melancholy commentary on the extreme lengths to which people can go to find inner peace. Man on Fire is thoughtful, occasionally funny and highly original. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

In Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin (The Dream Life of Sukhanov) tells the story of a woman's life, from her childhood dreams of becoming a poet to her closing fugue-like days, when those dreams entwine with her experiences and her regrets. Grushin emphasizes the choices that people make between following one's creative vision or a life of material comfort.

Her protagonist, the daughter of Russian intellectuals, grows up in Moscow and stays up late reading forbidden poetry. A romantic, she imagines the characters in her mind as mythical creatures. They enter her world in hallucinatory dream sequences, and they beckon her to a place where she, too, can be a poet, immortal and capable of seeing past the mundane surfaces of life. Her dreams propel her to apply to college in the American South, and then to the urban Northeast to make her way as a writer. There she connects with Paul Caldwell, a college friend from a wealthy family, and settles into a comfortable, upper-middle-class suburban life of motherhood, shopping and competitive decorating, interrupted only occasionally by the taunting memories of her youthful dreams. She turns a blind eye to the fissures in her life, filling the emptiness with yet another pregnancy, eventually finding deep pleasure in her children.

The genius of Forty Rooms is its suggestion that a betrayal of childhood dreams can still allow for a life filled with meaning, one that is contradictory, replete with loss, contentment, regret and its own definition of purpose. Forty Rooms is a beautiful, moving novel of dreams that reflects life as it is lived. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Twenty years after the plane crash, Kachemak Winkel and his aunt Snag still blame themselves for what happened that dismal day, when Kach's parents and older brother slammed into an Alaskan mountain. In their grief and guilt, Kache and Snag have put their lives on hold, but now, 38-year-old Kache has come home to Caboose, Alaska, to face the past and the future in All the Winters After by Seré Prince Halverson (The Underside of Joy).

Anxiously awaiting Kache's return from self-imposed exile, Snag is eager to see her beloved twin brother's son, but dreads what she must confess: she has never in 20 years summoned the courage to visit the family homestead. Kache is resolved to confront painful memories--but fears the house itself has sunk into the Alaskan woods. When Kache catches sight of the cabin--smoke curling from the chimney and grounds well tended--a third character enters the saga.

Even more remote from the village of Caboose than the Winkel homestead are "Old Believer" towns founded by members of the Russian Orthodox sect when Alaska was a Russian territory. Ready to confront the squatter in his family home, Kache discovers Nadia, who fled an abusive arranged marriage and has lived in the cabin, maintaining the property, for a decade. She slowly reveals her story, and the two support their mutual recovery from tragic pasts.

Halverson's three main characters--plus elderly Gram, Caboose locals and Snag's unlikely love interest--are patient and loving as they face old truths and try to plan a future. Conflicts resolve, but not predictably, and the majestic natural wonders of Alaska are a sensory delight throughout. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

On May 6, 1937, the luxury German airship Hindenburg met a spectacularly disastrous and highly publicized end when it went up in flames attempting to land at a New Jersey airfield. Despite a subsequent investigation, the cause of the fire was never clear, and the ship's demise has long been a subject of debate. Ariel Lawhon's second novel, Flight of Dreams, weaves the facts of the ship's final voyage together with a series of intertwined narratives of several passengers and crew members, each of whom has something to hide.

Journalist Gertrud Adelt has had her press card revoked by Joseph Goebbels and is still smarting from the insult. Novice cabin boy Werner Franz is desperate to prove himself to his crewmates. Widowed stewardess Emilie Imhoff is making secret plans for her future, which may be complicated by her feelings for navigator Max Zabel. And a mysterious American, traveling under an alias, will stop at nothing to carry out his murderous objective.

Lawhon (The Wife, The Maid, and the Mistress) deftly braids together the complex threads of her characters' stories, narrating via a keenly observed third-person voice. Her taut prose and subtle plotting create a gripping narrative, rich with historical detail and spiked with plenty of surprises even for those who know the Hindenburg's fate. Through her vividly drawn characters, Lawhon's story touches on grief, family loyalty, ambition, romance and complicated international politics. Like the spectators who observed the Hindenburg's fiery descent, readers will find themselves unable to look away. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Jo Nesbø's narrator in the standalone thriller Midnight Sun is running from the Fisherman, a powerful drug lord with eyes everywhere. The narrator knows it is only a matter of time until he is found, but he figures Kåsund, a small village in the far north of Norway, is as good a place to hide as any.

Introducing himself as Ulf, up from Oslo to hunt grouse, the narrator meets Lea and her precocious son, Knut, after they discover him sleeping in the church. Lea lends Ulf her husband's rifle since he has nothing to hunt with and shows him a small cabin in the woods where he can stay. Time alone in the secluded shack affords Ulf the opportunity to reflect on the past he's trying to escape. But he also spends time with the newly widowed Lea and grows fond of young Knut. Those familiar with a Nesbø novel know serenity can only be short lived, and it isn't long before Kåsund's visiting hunter becomes the hunted.

Midnight Sun is short, swift and thoroughly captivating. The author of the Harry Hole series continues his trend of well-crafted, surprising plots populated by complex, haunted characters. Midnight Sun offers several superb twists, as well as well-placed humor and strong symbolism--like the 24-hour sunlight offering no darkness in which to hide. The relationship dynamics of Kåsund's colorful citizens add to the suspense and illustrate Nesbø's skill for depicting rich, dimensional characters, regardless of their role. Ulf is arguably one of Nesbø's finest; his return would certainly be welcome. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Tim Sultan wandered by accident through the door beneath the sign that read simply "Bar," in the derelict neighborhood of mid-1990s Red Hook in Brooklyn, N.Y. Charmed by the proprietor, Antonio Raffaele "Sunny" Balzano, Sultan become a bar regular, then a bartender, and eventually left his Manhattan high-rise job to devote himself to the bar--or, more accurately, to Sunny himself. Sunny's Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World is an appreciation of that man.

Sunny's bar is "on the edge of the world" because Red Hook is both a point on what Sunny calls the Mississippi-Hudson River (because of the Hudson's role in his youth, which he recalls in parallel to the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn), and an outlier in the consciousness of greater Brooklyn. Sultan explores the history of the neighborhood as well as of Sunny and his bar, a family affair for generations. The result is both memoir and biography, alternating between the protagonists' years of friendship and their separate pasts: Sultan grew up in West Africa and Germany while Sunny's childhood was confined to Red Hook. Also an artist in diverse media, Sunny is wildly charismatic, with endless stories that unfailingly hold his audience spellbound; this is the real story of the bar. As Sunny and Sultan share histories, escapades (including a near-drowning in the Mississippi-Hudson) and hospital visits, old Red Hook wise guys (some still bending an elbow at Sunny's), poets, lovers, musicians and artists make for a colorful, eclectic and winning tale--like Sunny himself. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

John Kinsella is the international editor of the Kenyon Review and author of more than 40 books. In Firebreaks, he drops readers into the countryside of Western Australia, bringing lyricism to such mundane tasks as putting in a fence in "Fencing Reversals": "You wouldn't read about it: me putting a fence in/ rather than taking out; but today, that's just/ what I did," he writes. "I can barely hit the hard green keys/ of the priest's old typewriter, fingers so cut,/ scratched, pierced, and punctured."

He can take the energy of thunder and lightning and raise them to new heights, as in "Arc":

the time-rending slash of light,
magnesium-ribbon flare
that blinds in distending
sight into the infinite's
finitude, a slicing apart
of tissue and time, temporal
glitch where thunder and lightning
are one, no one counting down to safety,
as just metres away (imperial
and metric anneal), charged steel
fencepost, groundstar telescoped
to firmament, glistens and crackles.

Writing in multiple poetic formats, Kinsella evokes the ethereal quality of Thoreau while he lived near Walden Pond, but with a definite Aussie flavor all his own, which provides insight into a culture and environment that many may not be familiar with. He examines what it means to call a place home, to observe the landscape through its seasonal cycles, and to leave a homeland and return with fresh eyes that see the familiar in a new light. His work is refreshing, invigorating and well worth reading. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

"Once upon a time there were two sister princesses who lived in a tower. They ate leftover gas station food, stale cereal, and peanut butter sandwiches--only they had to settle for creamy because the evil stepmother didn't like crunchy." If their life really were a fairy tale, 12-year-old Sol Madrid and her six-year-old sister Ming would live happily ever after... once their magical, mythical Auntie Jove showed up in Louisiana to rescue them from their evil stepmother. But Tita Vea, the cruel woman their father married after their mother died, is, tragically, all they've got. After Papa abandons them all for another woman in the Philippines, their home country, Sol bounces between fantasy and reality as she navigates her existence with Tita Vea ("a fire-breathing dragon in dirty pink slippers"), her little sister whom she can't protect forever, and her best friend, Manny, who is becoming annoyingly interested in kissing her.

Filipina-American Erin Entrada Kelly's (Blackbird Fly) themes of sisterhood, friendship, truth and hope are what lift The Land of Forgotten Girls into the realm of the truly special. Sol is authentic--a Filipina girl with a thousand counts against her, who is as likely to be throwing pine cones at a private-school albino girl as she is to be befriending the one she has bloodied. Perhaps Sol's greatest saving grace is her ability to find the real-life heroes, and to accept their care and support in spite of her fiercely independent spirit. Readers who feel marginalized or alone in their troubles will adore Sol and her ragtag family, both chosen and "real." --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor